No, sustained and planned systemic change is required so that 5 years from now, Dublin City centre has 50,000 more apartments at her centre than today.
I rented in Dublin fro 10 years as a young professional, wanting to live in town, where I was working and spending my my time, but instead, I was renting 3 and 4 bed houses with mates all over the suburbs of the city.
Beyond Dublin, smaller towns all need more apartments to be built, there just aren’t enough rentals in the country to meet demand and its skyrocketed prices for everyone forced to move over the last t years.
Private landlords are exciting the market is that have reduced property rights. Unlimited tenancies are making small landlords very vulnerable to bad tenants. No small landlord wants the hassle to gather evidence to why there tenants should be evicted.
Genuine question, what about problem tenants who refuse to pay rent, engaging in anti social behaviour constantly? That’s an issue that’s never mentioned, we can’t evict them and try to house people who aren’t causing hell on earth for everyone else.
You bring in an eviction ban then you can’t evict them either. The councils have tons of lunatic tenants and they’re occupying spaces while normal, good people can’t get a roof over their heads. I think the council need to start taking faster action against career criminals in social housing. It’s a benefit and a blessing, it’s treated like an entitlement.
I’m not a lefty at all, but I have great respect for Eoin, his acumen and intellect is noted. He’s right about REITs, Kennedy Wilson and the like, make them sell their stock I say.
They are making the market progressively less attractive, more restrictive and more volatile for landlords. Then they complain when these landlords attempt to pull out of the market and sell up.
The state needs to step up and start building their own housing instead of relying on private citizens to house the people of Ireland. It doesn’t work.
>coupled with the growing number of single property private landlords exiting the market is driving the homelessness crisis.
Man who has spent years demonizing landlords and trying to make the environment for small landlords as hostile as possible (rent control, blanket ban on evictions) is shocked to find small landlords fleeing the market.
It’s not a crisis at this stage, it’s a system of denial of people’s rights
Literally an article that says nothing. A load of statements of facts we already know about.
If you’re looking for the TL;DR here, Eoin says that we urgently need to have a meeting to agree to come up with a plan.
​
>Yesterday, I wrote to Minister O’Brien urging him to convene an urgent meeting to address the crisis in the private rental sector.
>
>That meeting should involve tenant and landlord representative bodies such as Threshold and the IPOA/IPAV. The RTB should be in attendance as well as opposition housing spokespersons.
>
>The purpose of the meeting should be to agree on a plan to respond to the deepening crisis in the private rental sector.
The implication here that nobody appears to be doing anything. So they should be seen to be doing something.
Should we put a hold on evictions? Maybe. Maybe if the individual can prove that they’re being evicted into homelessness – say proof of being in the place for a year, and a letter from the dept of housing – then the landlord is prevented from evicting them and the state pays the rent.
A blanket eviction ban leaves lots of room for piss-taking, and arguably makes the whole problem worse. Who is going to take on a new tenant if they’re not allowed to evict?
This really seems like a time for better long-term security of tenure rather than patchwork fixes. Plugging the dam works for a month but causes issues to crop up elsewhere. Rebuilding it completely solves the problem for longer.
Why can’t we build huge apartment buildings in the city center? 50 floors for example?
I know the council will hit back with the usual response of it will ruin the skyline, but let’s be real, DCC has a shit skyline and sure the first block will look out of place, but in time as we built more, it will look great.
Sure apartments aren’t for everyone, but they are for alot of people. Especially people on their 20s/30s. At a reasonable rent they would be loved.
I don’t think the Manhattan sky like looks half bad.
Capping buildings at 6 floors, for no good reason when we have fuck all units is short sighted and should be a sackable offense.
Well thank fuck someone finally said something. /s
Urgent was 5 years ago.
I’m so sick of hearing this over and over but nothing happening.
I have a couple of problems with this article. While it does list a few of the issues causing our housing problem it leaves out a number of contributing factors that are politically unpopular. For example there was no mention of NIMBY’s or Dubliners opposing density developments and how migration has contributed to the rental shortage.
Besides all that my biggest issue with the article is the constant focus on homelessness. Don’t get me wrong, I agree that it’s a huge problem that has to be solved… however the pressure is being felt across the whole rental sector… not just by those facing homelessness. Young couples can’t save a deposit for a house because they’re spending all their money on rent. High end professionals who’ve moved here are stuck sharing with others when they want their own place.
It make you wonder about how SF view this problem, do they have any interest in solving it for the “well off” or are they only interested in the homelessness issue. Their party leader recently objected to a development that would have suited tech professionals (because our political system rewards those that object to developments). The problem with her successful objection is that without developments like that (service the high end of the market) you put pressure on the whole system. Those professionals are competing with that young couple for a smaller pool of accommodation.
As I’ve said here before SF will have to do a 180 on REITs when they get into power or else they’ll make the situation worse.
Stop giving scroungers a house for life
No shit, Sherlock.
It’s been urgent for about 10 years now. Fuck off
I generally have a lot of time for Eoin and think he’s one of the sharpest operators in the Dail, but this is not great, bemoaning the number of landlords hightailing it out of the market after spending the last two years demonising them.
SF have settled too cosily into pure populism. It’s easy to criticise the all of the housing missteps that the Gov have done consistently over the past 10-15 years, but they seem to have giving up on actually offering realistic solutions to issues and are now in vote consolidation mode. Climate action is a perfect example, I’ve no idea what their plans are other than to say we need urgent action, but don’t do anything to piss over farmers and certainly not anything involving carbon tax. Their track record of engaging in parish pump style planning objections is also not great.
SF basically ran the councils from 2014-2019, and the council is the main driver of affordable and social housing in ireland – NOT the central Govt, until last year when Darragh O’Brien streamlined a bunch of stuff.
Most people will have heard the term “a council house”.
SF gave us 5 years of motions supporting Palestine and blocked every possible housing project. They even blocked developments that were 100% social housing, and voted against _their own motion_ to do so.
This is how SF operate, we’ve all seen it here and in the North: get in, gridlock everything to make everything worse, and convince people that it’s “the system” that’s the problem.
We have *tonnes* of affordable housing constantly coming online until 2014, when it just stopped. And now there’s a massive backlog.
The only 2 parties that will never ever actually dedicate the state to building housing for normal people are FG and SF. Literally every other party wants to.
Oh and Róisín Shorthall – she’s famous for running local campaigns opposing every single new build in her area, then getting up in the Dáil and attacking the Govt over the lack of housing. You couldn’t make it up.
He’s spot on, as per usual.
This government is the worst in the history of the state
Either the government directly build loads of housing, or the government makes it incredibly lucrative for private investors to develop more housing. Those are your only 2 substantive options.
The government is nearly incompetent, but doesn’t care about financial returns. Private investors are very competent, but will only enter the market if they can achieve high returns. The government has made it financially unviable for most investors to develop housing, while failing to develop housing themselves. Best bet is to align the incentives of developers with the public. Make building lucrative again!
I wouldn’t vote for SF, but this guy is usually sensible, at least until he starts being politics.
We need more housing stock which will take a few years to come on line. Realistically this will have to be built by the private sector – setting up a government agency will take years and probably be a disaster like other large government bodies
In the mean time we need landlords to bring loads of space to the market and for them not to Rip off tenants or the government.
I don’t know the solution. But I think they need to shift from carrot to stick with developers and investors:
– Tax the hell out of land sale so as that profiteering from land sale is impossible. Land costs drive housing and development costs which is insane.
– increasingly punitive taxes on undeveloped zoned land
– massive penalties for unoccupied apartments or buildings
-tax breaks for small landlords, so long as they charge an affordable rent (hit them hard of they don’t)
– incentives and penalties to bring rundown or dilapidated buildings back on line
All of this would take a willingness to devalue the institutionally held housing stock, to make land sale unprofitable and to micro manage private sector development. This would fly in the face of the pro-developer culture in government, but something new had to tried and money that flows to landlords, land speculators and developers has to be reduced.
Just handed my long term tenants notice, I’ll be out of the game good luck finding anyone to invest it the unpredictable market they’ve created.
It’s gone I’m sure if I don’t move them out of it now, I’ll never be able to get it back for myself or sale in the future.
Hes right, but his party won’t fix it. Not a chance. This needs the Councils to accept massive apartments in the city scape and they simply aren’t up to that task
26 comments
we can’t fix it over night. fucking sinn fein
Ah here, are SF the party of landlords now
No, sustained and planned systemic change is required so that 5 years from now, Dublin City centre has 50,000 more apartments at her centre than today.
I rented in Dublin fro 10 years as a young professional, wanting to live in town, where I was working and spending my my time, but instead, I was renting 3 and 4 bed houses with mates all over the suburbs of the city.
Beyond Dublin, smaller towns all need more apartments to be built, there just aren’t enough rentals in the country to meet demand and its skyrocketed prices for everyone forced to move over the last t years.
Private landlords are exciting the market is that have reduced property rights. Unlimited tenancies are making small landlords very vulnerable to bad tenants. No small landlord wants the hassle to gather evidence to why there tenants should be evicted.
Genuine question, what about problem tenants who refuse to pay rent, engaging in anti social behaviour constantly? That’s an issue that’s never mentioned, we can’t evict them and try to house people who aren’t causing hell on earth for everyone else.
You bring in an eviction ban then you can’t evict them either. The councils have tons of lunatic tenants and they’re occupying spaces while normal, good people can’t get a roof over their heads. I think the council need to start taking faster action against career criminals in social housing. It’s a benefit and a blessing, it’s treated like an entitlement.
I’m not a lefty at all, but I have great respect for Eoin, his acumen and intellect is noted. He’s right about REITs, Kennedy Wilson and the like, make them sell their stock I say.
They are making the market progressively less attractive, more restrictive and more volatile for landlords. Then they complain when these landlords attempt to pull out of the market and sell up.
The state needs to step up and start building their own housing instead of relying on private citizens to house the people of Ireland. It doesn’t work.
>coupled with the growing number of single property private landlords exiting the market is driving the homelessness crisis.
Man who has spent years demonizing landlords and trying to make the environment for small landlords as hostile as possible (rent control, blanket ban on evictions) is shocked to find small landlords fleeing the market.
It’s not a crisis at this stage, it’s a system of denial of people’s rights
Literally an article that says nothing. A load of statements of facts we already know about.
If you’re looking for the TL;DR here, Eoin says that we urgently need to have a meeting to agree to come up with a plan.
​
>Yesterday, I wrote to Minister O’Brien urging him to convene an urgent meeting to address the crisis in the private rental sector.
>
>That meeting should involve tenant and landlord representative bodies such as Threshold and the IPOA/IPAV. The RTB should be in attendance as well as opposition housing spokespersons.
>
>The purpose of the meeting should be to agree on a plan to respond to the deepening crisis in the private rental sector.
The implication here that nobody appears to be doing anything. So they should be seen to be doing something.
Should we put a hold on evictions? Maybe. Maybe if the individual can prove that they’re being evicted into homelessness – say proof of being in the place for a year, and a letter from the dept of housing – then the landlord is prevented from evicting them and the state pays the rent.
A blanket eviction ban leaves lots of room for piss-taking, and arguably makes the whole problem worse. Who is going to take on a new tenant if they’re not allowed to evict?
This really seems like a time for better long-term security of tenure rather than patchwork fixes. Plugging the dam works for a month but causes issues to crop up elsewhere. Rebuilding it completely solves the problem for longer.
Why can’t we build huge apartment buildings in the city center? 50 floors for example?
I know the council will hit back with the usual response of it will ruin the skyline, but let’s be real, DCC has a shit skyline and sure the first block will look out of place, but in time as we built more, it will look great.
Sure apartments aren’t for everyone, but they are for alot of people. Especially people on their 20s/30s. At a reasonable rent they would be loved.
I don’t think the Manhattan sky like looks half bad.
Capping buildings at 6 floors, for no good reason when we have fuck all units is short sighted and should be a sackable offense.
Well thank fuck someone finally said something. /s
Urgent was 5 years ago.
I’m so sick of hearing this over and over but nothing happening.
I have a couple of problems with this article. While it does list a few of the issues causing our housing problem it leaves out a number of contributing factors that are politically unpopular. For example there was no mention of NIMBY’s or Dubliners opposing density developments and how migration has contributed to the rental shortage.
Besides all that my biggest issue with the article is the constant focus on homelessness. Don’t get me wrong, I agree that it’s a huge problem that has to be solved… however the pressure is being felt across the whole rental sector… not just by those facing homelessness. Young couples can’t save a deposit for a house because they’re spending all their money on rent. High end professionals who’ve moved here are stuck sharing with others when they want their own place.
It make you wonder about how SF view this problem, do they have any interest in solving it for the “well off” or are they only interested in the homelessness issue. Their party leader recently objected to a development that would have suited tech professionals (because our political system rewards those that object to developments). The problem with her successful objection is that without developments like that (service the high end of the market) you put pressure on the whole system. Those professionals are competing with that young couple for a smaller pool of accommodation.
As I’ve said here before SF will have to do a 180 on REITs when they get into power or else they’ll make the situation worse.
Stop giving scroungers a house for life
No shit, Sherlock.
It’s been urgent for about 10 years now. Fuck off
I generally have a lot of time for Eoin and think he’s one of the sharpest operators in the Dail, but this is not great, bemoaning the number of landlords hightailing it out of the market after spending the last two years demonising them.
SF have settled too cosily into pure populism. It’s easy to criticise the all of the housing missteps that the Gov have done consistently over the past 10-15 years, but they seem to have giving up on actually offering realistic solutions to issues and are now in vote consolidation mode. Climate action is a perfect example, I’ve no idea what their plans are other than to say we need urgent action, but don’t do anything to piss over farmers and certainly not anything involving carbon tax. Their track record of engaging in parish pump style planning objections is also not great.
SF basically ran the councils from 2014-2019, and the council is the main driver of affordable and social housing in ireland – NOT the central Govt, until last year when Darragh O’Brien streamlined a bunch of stuff.
Most people will have heard the term “a council house”.
SF gave us 5 years of motions supporting Palestine and blocked every possible housing project. They even blocked developments that were 100% social housing, and voted against _their own motion_ to do so.
This is how SF operate, we’ve all seen it here and in the North: get in, gridlock everything to make everything worse, and convince people that it’s “the system” that’s the problem.
We have *tonnes* of affordable housing constantly coming online until 2014, when it just stopped. And now there’s a massive backlog.
The only 2 parties that will never ever actually dedicate the state to building housing for normal people are FG and SF. Literally every other party wants to.
Oh and Róisín Shorthall – she’s famous for running local campaigns opposing every single new build in her area, then getting up in the Dáil and attacking the Govt over the lack of housing. You couldn’t make it up.
He’s spot on, as per usual.
This government is the worst in the history of the state
Either the government directly build loads of housing, or the government makes it incredibly lucrative for private investors to develop more housing. Those are your only 2 substantive options.
The government is nearly incompetent, but doesn’t care about financial returns. Private investors are very competent, but will only enter the market if they can achieve high returns. The government has made it financially unviable for most investors to develop housing, while failing to develop housing themselves. Best bet is to align the incentives of developers with the public. Make building lucrative again!
I wouldn’t vote for SF, but this guy is usually sensible, at least until he starts being politics.
We need more housing stock which will take a few years to come on line. Realistically this will have to be built by the private sector – setting up a government agency will take years and probably be a disaster like other large government bodies
In the mean time we need landlords to bring loads of space to the market and for them not to Rip off tenants or the government.
I don’t know the solution. But I think they need to shift from carrot to stick with developers and investors:
– Tax the hell out of land sale so as that profiteering from land sale is impossible. Land costs drive housing and development costs which is insane.
– increasingly punitive taxes on undeveloped zoned land
– massive penalties for unoccupied apartments or buildings
-tax breaks for small landlords, so long as they charge an affordable rent (hit them hard of they don’t)
– incentives and penalties to bring rundown or dilapidated buildings back on line
All of this would take a willingness to devalue the institutionally held housing stock, to make land sale unprofitable and to micro manage private sector development. This would fly in the face of the pro-developer culture in government, but something new had to tried and money that flows to landlords, land speculators and developers has to be reduced.
Just handed my long term tenants notice, I’ll be out of the game good luck finding anyone to invest it the unpredictable market they’ve created.
It’s gone I’m sure if I don’t move them out of it now, I’ll never be able to get it back for myself or sale in the future.
Hes right, but his party won’t fix it. Not a chance. This needs the Councils to accept massive apartments in the city scape and they simply aren’t up to that task
Planned economy = communism, unplanned economy = endentured servitude to greedy oportunitsts
SF are also prominent NIMBYs